Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

this. He doesn’t know what he’s started.”

“Yes, you Americans are very good at killing. I saw that myself fifteen

minutes ago.”

“In that case, Mr. Koga, you also saw that we left one man alive.”

Clark’s angry reply stopped conversation cold for several seconds. Koga

was slow to realize that it was true. The one outside the door had been alive

when they’d walked over his body, moaning and shuddering as though from

electric shocks, but definitely alive.

“Why didn’t you . . . ?”

‘ ‘There was no reason to kill him,” Chavez said. “I’m not going to apolo-

gize for that Kaneda bastard. He had it coming, and when I came into the

room, he was reaching for a weapon, and that’s tough cookies, sir. But this

isn’t a movie. We don’t kill people for amusement, and we came in to rescue

you because somebody has to end this goddamned war-okay?”

” Even then-even then, what your Congress did … how can my country

survive economically-”

” W i 11 i t be better for anybody if the war goes on?” Clark asked.” If Japan

and China kick off against Russia, what happens to you then? Who do you

suppose will really pay the price for that mistake? China? I don’t think so.”

The first word in Washington came via satellite. One of NSA’s orbiting

“hitchhiker” ELINT birds happened to be overhead to record the termina-

tion of signal-that was the NSA term for it-from three AEW aircraft.

Other NSA listening posts recorded radio chatter that lasted for several min-

utes before ending. Analysts were trying to make sense of it now, the report

in Ryan’s hands told him.

Only one kill, the Colonel told himself. Well, he’d have to be content with

that. His wingman had bagged the last of the -i.sJs. The southern element

had gotten three, and the Strike Eagles had gotten the other four when their

support had been cut off, leaving them suddenly and unexpectedly vulnera-

ble. Presumably the ZORRO team had gotten the third £-767. On the whole,

not a bad night’s work, but a long one, he thought, forming his flight of four

back up for the rendezvous with the tanker and the three hours back to She-

mya. The hardest part was the enforced radio silence. Some of his people

had to be counting coup in a big way, full of themselves in the way of fighter

pilots who had done the job and lived to tell the tale, and wanting to talk

through it. That would change shortly, he thought, the enforced silence forc-

ing him to think about his first-ever air-to-air kill. Thirty people on the air-

craft. Damn, he was supposed to feel good about a kill, wasn’t he? So why

didn’t he?

Something interesting had just happened, Dutch Claggett thought. They

were still catching bits and pieces of the SSK in their area, but whoever it

was, it had turned north and away from them, allowing Tennessee to remain

on station. In the way of submarines on patrol, he’d come close enough to

the surface to put up his ESM antenna and track the Japanese radar aircraft

for the past day or so, learning what he could for possible forwarding to

others. Electronic-intelligence gathering had been a submarine mission

since before his application to Annapolis, and his crew included two elec-

tronics techs who showed a real aptitude for it. But they’d had two on the

monitoring systems that had just gone-poof! Then they’d caught some

radio chatter, excited by the sound of it, and one by one those voices had

gone off the air, somewhere to his north.

“You suppose we just got up on the scoreboard, Cap’n?” Lieutenant

Shaw asked, expecting the Captain to know, because captains were sup-

posed to know everything, even though they didn’t.

“Seems that way.”

“Conn, sonar.”

“Conn, aye.”

“Our friend is snorting again, bearing zero-zero-nine, probable CZ con-

tact,” the sonar chief thought.

“I’ll start the track,” Shaw said, heading aft for the plotting table.

“So what happened?” Durling asked.

“We killed three of their radar aircraft, and the strike force annihilated

their fighter patrol.” This was not a time, however, for gloating.

“This is the twitchiest part?”

Ryan luxUlcd. “Yes, sir. We need them confused for a while longer, but

lor now ihey know something is happening. They know-”

“They know it might be a real war after all. Any word on Koga?”

“Not yet.”

It was four in the morning and all three men were showing it. Koga was over

the stress period, for the moment, trying to use his head instead of his emo-

tions while his two hosts-that was how he thought of them, rather to his

surprise-drove him around and wondered how smart it was to have left the

one guard alive outside Yamata’s condo. He would be up and moving by

now? Would he call the police? Someone else? What would result from the

night’s adventure?

“How do I know that I can trust you?” Koga asked after a lengthy si-

lence.

Clark’s hands squeezed the wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints in the

plastic. It was the movies and TV that caused dumbass questions like that. In

those media, spies did all manner of complicated things in the hope of out-

smarting the equally brilliant adversaries against whom they were pitted.

Reality was different. You kept operations as simple as you could because

even the simplest things could blow up on you, and if the other guy was so

goddamned brilliant, you wouldn’t even know who the hell he was; and

tricking people into doing the things you wanted them to do was something

that only worked if you arranged a single option for the other guy, and even

then he’d often as not do something unexpected anyway.

“Sir, we just put our lives at risk for you, but, okay, don’t trust us at all.

I’m not dumb enough to tell you what to do. I don’t know your politics well

enough for that. What I’m telling you is very simple. We will be doing

things-what all of them are, I do not know anyway, so I can’t tell you. We

want to end this war with a minimum of violence, but there will be violence.

You also want the war to end, right?”

“Of course 1 want it to end,” Koga said, his manners not helped by his

fatigue.

“Well, sir, you do whatever you think is best, okay? You see, Mr. Koga,

you don’t have to trust us, but we sure as hell have to trust you to do what’s

best for your country and for ours.” Clark’s comment, exasperated as it was,

turned out to be the best thing he could have said.

“Oh.” The politician thought that one over. “Yes. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Where can we drop you off?”

“Kimura’s home,” Koga said at once.

“Fine.” Clark dredged up the location and turned the car onto Route 122

to head for it. Then he reminded himself that he’d learned one highly impor-

tant thing this night, and that after getting this guy to a place of relative

safety, his top priority was getting that information to Washington. The

empty streets helped, and though he wished for coffee to keep himself alert,

it was i\ mere forty minutes to the crowded neighborhood of diminutive tract

homes where the MITI official lived. The lights were already on when they

pulled up to the house, and they just let Koga out to walk to the door. Isamu

Kimura answered the door and took his guest inside with a mouth almost as

wide as the entrance to his home.

Who ever said these people didn’t show emotion? Clark asked himself.

“Who do you suppose the leaker is?” Ding asked, still in the backseat.

“Good boy-you caught that, too.”

“Hey, I’m the only college graduate in the car, Mr. C.” Ding opened the

computer to draft the dispatch to Langley, again via Moscow.

“They did what?” Yamata snarled into the phone.

“This is serious.” It was General Arima, and he’d just gotten the word

from Tokyo himself. “They smashed our air defenses and just went away

afterwards.”

“How?” the industrialist demanded. Hadn’t they told him that the Kami

aircraft were invincible?

“They don’t know how yet, but I’m telling you this is very serious. They

have the ability to raid the Home Islands now.”

Think, Yamata told himself, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs.’ ‘Gen-

eral, they still cannot invade our islands, can they? They can sting us, but

they cannot really hurt us, and as long as we have nuclear weapons …”

“Unless they try something else. The Americans are not acting as we

have been given to expect.”

That remark stung the next Governor of Saipan. Today was supposed to

have been the day on which he’d begin his campaign. Well, yes, he’d over-

estimated the effect his action would have on the American financial mar-